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2015 (continued)

By Stephen M. Walt, Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Affairs; Faculty Chair, International Security Program

"...[T]he keys to success are not bellicose speeches, mass marches, wars on terror, or continued military interventions throughout the Middle East and Central Asia. The key is calm resolution and conscious efforts to build resiliency at home."

By Stephen M. Walt, Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Affairs; Faculty Chair, International Security Program

"When Washington goes to war on the basis of cooked intelligence, worst-case assumptions, and unsurpassed hubris, then other countries will be warier the next time we try to get them to line up alongside us....If foreign powers believe U.S. policy is driven more by domestic politics than by strategic imperatives, they'll view us with barely veiled contempt and meddle even more in our porous political system."

2014

By Stephen M. Walt, Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Affairs; Faculty Chair, International Security Program

"I've written a lot of critical things about neoconservatives over the years, but given the damage that their policies inflicted on the United States and several other countries, any criticism to date is still less than they deserve."

By Stephen M. Walt, Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Affairs; Faculty Chair, International Security Program

"So what's Barack Obama to do? I have a suggestion: pardon them all. But I don't just mean the Bush-era officials who ordered, justified, conducted, or tried to conceal these crimes. In addition, Obama should also pardon the whistleblowers and dissidents who broke the law while trying to expose these (and other) government excesses."

By Stephen M. Walt, Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Affairs; Faculty Chair, International Security Program

"Contrast that admirable clarity and responsiveness with the way that the United States deals with far more costly foreign policy screw-ups. Even when the strategic and/or human consequences are enormous, the U.S. government finds it nearly impossible to evaluate what went wrong in a candid, clear-eyed, and timely manner. It is even harder for the government to assign responsibility for wrongdoing; if anything, officials tend to bend over backward to shield wrongdoers..."

By Stephen M. Walt, Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Affairs; Faculty Chair, International Security Program

"The United States hasn't been able to fix its racial divisions in a century and a half, but we thought we could settle some equally deep divisions in a few years in foreign countries that we barely understood."

By Stephen M. Walt, Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Affairs; Faculty Chair, International Security Program

"Iran's supreme leader should be grateful to congressional hard-liners like Sens. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), and to the various right-wing organizations that are working hard to derail a possible nuclear deal. If the latest extension of the talks goes nowhere and congressional opposition gets the United States blamed for the failure...the opportunity to open Iran up to the outside world will be postponed yet again....Treating Cuba like a pariah for 50 years hasn't toppled the Castro brothers, and keeping Iran isolated and sanctioned hasn't shaken the Islamic Republic much, either."

By Stephen M. Walt, Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Affairs; Faculty Chair, International Security Program

"China's increasingly assertive policies toward its immediate neighborhood shows that Beijing is hardly indifferent to geopolitics, and Russia's assertive defense of what it sees as vital interests in its 'near abroad' (e.g., Ukraine) suggests that somebody in Moscow didn't get the memo about the benign effects of globalization. And regional powers like India, Turkey, and Japan are taking traditional geopolitical concerns more seriously these days. Bottom line: If you thought great-power rivalry was a thing of the past, think again."

By Stephen M. Walt, Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Affairs; Faculty Chair, International Security Program

"If we didn't have all these cool high-tech hammers, in short, we'd have to stop treating places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Syria as if they were nails that just needed another pounding, and we might work harder at marginalizing our enemies within their own societies. To do that, we would have to be building more effective partnerships with authoritative sources of legitimacy within these societies, including religious leaders. Our failure to do more to discredit these movements is perhaps the single biggest shortcoming of the entire war on terror..."

By Stephen M. Walt, Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Affairs; Faculty Chair, International Security Program

"Is this any way for the senior officials of a mature great power to behave? Loose lips sink ships, and loose talk derails effective diplomacy. If there was a purpose behind this statement, then it was lame-brained. And if it was just a petulant bit of verbal payback by a frustrated official, then it's a sign of professional incompetence."

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